Tag: open source developers

For the first time, court lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. This means now all open source licenses are enforceable. An extremely favorable decision toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.

Red hat’s Open Source Assurance program is already used to safeguard customers developing and deploying open source solutions. Red hat now asking court to limit patents on software:

Open source software is one of the most dynamic, innovative sectors of the U.S. economy, but the U.S. patent system is a costly hindrance to open source innovation. We believe that although the patent system was created to foster innovation, itâ€™s simply not an engine for innovation for open source. Software patents were barely recognized when open source began, and so the hope of obtaining a patent did not motivate the first developers. Those pioneers were generally opposed to software patents. The open, collaborative activity at the heart of open source is at odds with the patent system, which excludes the public from making, using or selling a patented invention. Open source developers seek to contribute code to the community â€“ not to exclude others from using the code.

There is also Open Invention Network (OIN) backed by IBN, Red Hat, Novell, Sony and others. OIN is a company that acquires patents and offers them royalty free “to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux operating system or certain Linux-related applications”. On a related note, Microsoft has claimed that free software such as OpenOffice.org and the Linux kernel violate 235 Microsoft patents and said that it will seek license fees.

If you know open source based application development, you can make more money. A report from New York City-based consulting company Bluewolf says IT salaries across the board will continue to rise in 2008:

The rise of open source software in application development puts developers with a specialization in those technologies in a position to ask for a 30 or 40 percent pay increase, Kirven says. “We’ve gotten more requests from our permanent placement division for open source developers in the last six months than in the last five or six years combined,” he says. “It’s not as easy as getting free software, someone has to get it up and running. LAMP is everywhere now — these types of technologies no one heard of 18 months ago are all the sudden becoming a hot commodity.”